Reporter's Notebook | Public health expo focuses on H1N1, water

It’s 9 a.m. on a Wednesday, and I’m staring at a disembodied female pelvis, complete with vagina. Nearby, a man in Navy dress blues is talking with an absent-minded-professor type in orange and yellow plaid. Farther away, two women demonstrate a delouser that looks like a miniature canister vacuum set to “blow.”

It’s the last day of the American Public Health Association’s Annual Meeting and Exposition, the largest public health conference in the world.

This year, more than 13,000 professionals descended upon the Philadelphia Convention Center for the 137th conference, whose theme was “Water and Public Health.”

The APHA gathering is divided into two parts. The Meeting is one of the foremost research conferences in the world. Over 900 panels present the latest research in disease prevention and public health.

This year, two of the spotlight panels focus on clean water strategies and regulations. A dozen or so attendees are spread throughout large ballrooms, watching as the presenters gamely speak on.

Everyone has deserted the first two panels in favor of the standing-room-only third panel, the unofficial star of the conference: H1N1. Pandemic influenza only happens every so often, and it seems that no one wanted to miss out, regardless of the panel’s relevance to his or her particular field.

The second part, the Expo, is more eclectic.

For public health professionals, the APHA Expo is the place to network. The aisles are filled with organizations jockeying for attention.

Public health schools are out in force with brochures, candy and free pens, while the big pharmaceutical and government booths are more reserved, secure in their position at the top of the field.

Advocacy groups are also present, including the Philadelphia Global Water Initiative. Christiaan Morssink, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Nursing at Penn and treasurer of the PGWI, said the Expo was “ a well-spent effort to make our voice heard elsewhere,” citing a panel PGWI ran on “Water Management through Multi-Disciplinary Collaborations.”

The small vendors are the most aggressive, trying to promote their products. Most are genuinely useful. Two representatives from a company called PharmaJet demonstrated a needle-free injection system that resembles an umbrella handle with a quick release button. They hope it will slow the spread of blood-borne illnesses like HIV. As I watch, one of the vendors injects a yellow foam ball with a blue liquid, then holds it up to demonstrate that the liquid has gone in.

After the hustle of the Expo floor, it takes one of the last panels of the day, “Water and Politics,” to bring me back from the planet of vacuum delousers and umbrella-handle syringes to the Earth on which they’d be used.

Four professors present on sewage problems in Karachi, drought and the drug trade in Kabul and water privatization in California. All deal with the struggles their regions have in obtaining and keeping clean water and sanitation.

“Ghandhi commented that for the starving masses of the world, the only form in which God dared appear was food,” says James Gilligan, one of the presenters. “I would suggest that for those deprived of clean water, the only form in which God dare appear is water which is pure.”

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